The typical enterprise technology landscape today is characterized by the distributed nature of its information systems and the heterogeneity of its technologies. Following decades of evolution and innovation, it is common to see “best-of-breed” packaged applications, such as ERP, CRM, SCM, SRM, PLM, etc., home-grown systems, and legacy applications, each with numerous interfaces interconnecting them. In these distributed and complex environments, the act of processing a typical transaction spans numerous applications and technological boundaries, often rendering the enterprise incapable of understanding execution paths for the transactions as well as their logical and technical interdependencies. Without the requisite knowledge of how the transactions are executed, the enterprise is severely limited in its ability to monitor transactions and to detect and remedy bottlenecks, latencies, and points-of-failure.
Enterprise organizations therefore seek to increase the visibility of their automated business transactions as they see a direct correlation between transaction visibility and business performance. Achieving a high-degree of visibility enables the enterprise to improve customer service, to monitor transaction performance and health, to optimize the business logic, and to implement efficient solutions to problems as they arise.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,738,813 to Reichman discloses a system for monitoring Web sites, or other server systems, as seen from the computing devices of other users. In a preferred embodiment, the system includes an agent component that runs on the computing devices of service users to provide functionality for accessing and monitoring the performance of a server. The agents are remotely configurable over the Internet, and may be configured, for example, to execute a particular Web transaction while monitoring specified performance parameters (server response times, network hop delays, server availability, etc). Using a service provider Web site, a user of the service can set up a monitoring session in which agent devices of other community members are used to monitor the performance of the user's server system.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,424,530 to Chagoly discloses a method for graph manipulation of transactional performance data to identify and emphasize root causes of electronic business system transaction processing performance problems. A system transaction monitoring system, is utilized to obtain transaction performance data for a system. This transaction performance data is utilized to present a graph of a given transaction or transactions.
US Patent Publication 20100228650 discloses a method of tracking information in a multi-tier computerized environment involving detecting data associated with at least one request or transaction related to a byte stream; and matching a thread associated with the byte stream with the at least one request or transaction associated with the at least one packet according to predetermined fields within the byte stream.
US Patent Publication 20060015512 to Alon et al. discloses an apparatus for monitoring a selected tier in a multi-tier computing environment. Monitored request traffic includes at least one entering request received at a request entry port from an adjacent tier, identifying each request in the monitored request traffic and sending at least a request identifier to the context agent. The context agent also receives information relating to the request context of the entering request from the context agent associated with the adjacent tier and the context agent associates the information relating to the request context of the entering request with the entering request, in accordance with a request identifier.